17th Century

The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world....

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today....

The year is 1680, in the heart of the Golden Age of Piracy, and more than 300 daring, hardened pirates—a potent mix of low-life scallywags and a rare breed of gentlemen buccaneers—gather on a remote Caribbean island....

Acclaimed historian Paul Strathern tells the vivid story of The Age of Reason, while also exploring the painful cost of creating the progress and modernity upon which the Western world was built.

Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal....

Carlos Eire, popular professor and gifted writer, chronicles the 200-year era of the Renaissance and Reformation with particular attention to issues that persist as concerns in the present day....

Bernard Bailyn gives us a compelling account of the first great transit of people from Britain, Europe, and Africa to British North America....

As he explodes many accepted pirate myths (i.e. "walking the plank" is pure fiction), Cordingly replaces them with a truth that is more complex and often bloodier....

Discover the lives of the men that forever changed the course of history! This book contains the fundamental history, influences, life-changing events, and lasting impact of historical figures....

The 17th-century battlefield ushered in a new era, with formed musketeers and pistol-wielding cavalry gradually taking over from the knights and men-at-arms that had dominated the European battlefield. Based on a detailed study of the primary sources, Steel Lobsters tells the story.

In 1819, a girl was born to the fourth son of King George III. No one could have expected such an unassuming, overprotected girl to be an effective ruler....

Viceroys is the story of the British aristocracy sent to govern India during the reigns of five British monarchs. It is also the story of how the modern British identity was established....

A medieval historian examines what we really know about the man who was "Merlin the Magician" and his impact on Britain....

In his first book of history, Away Off Shore, New York Times best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals the people and the stories behind what was once the whaling capital of the world....

When John Snare, a 19th-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation....

A groundbreaking examination of the greatest event in history, the Scientific Revolution, and how it came to change the way we understand ourselves and our world....

January, 1649. After seven years of fighting in the bloodiest war in Britain’s history, Parliament faced a problem: what to do with a defeated king, a king who refused to surrender....

Now an esoteric of legal and criminal history, A Hangman's Diary gives a year-by-year breakdown on all of Master Franz Schmidt's executions, which included hangings, beheadings, and other methods, as well as details of each capital crime and the reason for the punishment....

Founded at the dawn of the 17th century as European nations were establishing global empires, the English East India Company would become a vital part of burgeoning British supremacy....

Why spiritual and supernatural yearnings, even investigations into the occult, flourished in the era of rationalist philosophy.....

The thrilling narrative of how New York came to be, by the author of the beloved classic The Island at the Center of the World.

Events moved fast in the 1650s. Something cataclysmic happened every year, something that would thrust the newly formed republic, its people, and its eventual 'Lord Protector' Oliver Cromwell, in an entirely new direction.

An illuminating work of environmental history that chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, which transformed the social and political fabric of Europe....

One of our most renowned and brilliant historians takes a fresh look at the revolutionary intellectual movement that laid the foundation for the modern world....

In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel....